The last months were pretty quiet around ScottGu but yesterday evening, for us Belgian people, there was a great and lengthy streamed event about Windows Azure. As I’m the competence center leader of the Azure Cloud Computing team at Ordina Belgium I took the opportunity to gather up with colleagues, ordered pizza and made a great evening.
I’m glad to see this kind of events happening. They provide excellent coverage about the topic, starting out in a way that newcomers can follow with ease but also introducing the latest and greatest tooling and progress the Windows Azure platform has made during the last months. There’s also a ton of great news on the fronts of having people with skills other than .NET being served as well. Node.js, Java, PHP and other technologies get attention. That’s just awesome!
The Windowsazure.com website also got a major update with that nice looking Metro style sauce over it.
In the past people sometimes feared testing the cloud for budget reasons. Even a colleague of mine once had to find out the hard way that when you shut down an instance but keep the deployment you also keep on getting charged. Microsoft now releases a new way to explore Azure for 3 months but with a spending limit. According to me that promises a safer way to spend researching Azure.
Grz, Kris.